My Own Middling Place

One of my favorite bloggers, Aunt Becky, recently wrote a post called The Middling Place. She wrote about the space of time between the diagnosis of her daughter Amelia with an encephalocele and the set in of reality. She wrote,

It was the beginning of what I called The Middling Place. The space between learning how quickly your world can be turned on it’s head and learning how to live sideways. The space between diagnosis and reality.

The place where you wait.

This post hit home for me more than I really care to think about. My own son’s diagnoses (plural? I don’t know.) have left us with a lot of waiting. Waiting to see if the medication works. Waiting to see if a new fever brings a new round of febrile seizures. No matter that the last bout of life threatening seizures was more than 18 months ago. We sit. We wait. We watch.

Now combined with a new diagnosis of multiple food allergies to peanuts, tree nuts, fish, coconut, eggs, and soy, we sit and wait. We watch. We adjust to this being our new reality, our new normal. Constant vigilance over what he eats… looking at every packaged and prepared food suspiciously. And most importantly not knowing how his seemingly strong little body will react to an allergen. Will it be complaints of “my tongue hurts” when the stupid gummy vitamin is made with coconut oil? Will it be complaints of “my tummy hurts” or vomiting if some fish gets into his food? Or God forbid, could the next reaction to a simple little dietary slip be full on anaphylactic shock?